Windows XP is, however, decreasing in usage. It had a 57.6% market share in January 2011. Users are gradually migrating to Windows 7 and eventually Windows 8 when it is released. Windows 8 will be the dominant OS in about 2 years.

Its interesting times ahead with smart phones. The competition from these major brands will only produce better products in the end for the consumer.

The branding campaign from W3C is being done in hope that HTML5 will be widely used in not only creating web sites, but also desktop applications and streaming video. There are first person shooter games that have been ported to HTML5, so the possibilities of what can be accomplished are great.

It will be interesting to see how HTML5 competes against Flash and Silverlight.

Version 2.0 integrates with Internet Explorer and Windows Firewall. If your firewall isn’t enabled, it will ask to turn it on. The new version has an improved anti-malware engine which Microsoft claims that it runs faster. The Internet Explorer integrations works only Vista and Windows 7 machines.

Microsoft Security Essentials is free for home users and business up to 10 users. I’ve been using for a few months now since I uninstalled the McAfee virus scanners. The software works just as well as its commercial counterparts. The only I would like to see is Microsoft updating Windows Firewall so that it can block outgoing traffic in addition to incoming.

As with any upgrade, I recommend that you backup your WordPress blog and database. This is necessary because the update may not agree with your theme or plugins and you will be forced to go back to a working version.

The update is easy to do within the administrator screen. Click on the Please update now link and your blog will automatically be updated (see below).

WordPress generates a report while doing the update and will inform you if it was successful.

As you can see, the update to this blog was successful. The only time that a WordPress upgrade failed for me was with version 2.3. Fortunately, I made backups and was able to revert back to 2.2.2. Backing data is an essential task for every webmaster.

A Haiku was made for the this version as well:

Fixed on day zero
One-click update makes you safe
This used to be hard

The Haiku is accurate. WordPress can be easily updated with one click in the control panel. The procedure before this involved downloading the upgrade files from WordPress.org, uploading and overwriting your blog files with an FTP client, then running a page to finalize the installation. This isn’t difficult for a web developer, but the average person would be lost at the first step.

I successfully installed the update and everything is working properly on my blog. I recommend that you backup your blog and database before doing any update to it. An incompatible plugin could force you to go back to the previous version of WordPress.

You can download WordPress 3.0.2 for a manual install at the Download WordPress page.

I gave the camera to my kids to play with and recently noticed that the battery door wouldn’t close fully anymore. With fully charged batteries, the camera wouldn’t power up, so it was time to throw it away. But, being the curious person that I am, I wanted to take the camera apart and look inside.

Opening the Case

The capacitor for the flash is quite large and you need to be careful around it. They can still hold a large even though the camera is off. I removed the lens and lifted the capacitor to reveal the circuit board below.

The lens and circuit board at the bottom of it.

The LCD screen and circuit board. I took apart the LCD it consisted of several layers of transparent sheets which is what makes up the twisted nematic display. The nematic liquid crystal display works in between two plates of glass.

The CCD

This is the most important part of a digital camera: the CCD. It was a real surprise to see this circuit and the photo below doesn’t do it justice. The CCD looks like a shiny jewel. The lens send optical images to this devices and the image is translated into 1′s and 0’s before being stored in xD card. DSLR’s have a much bigger CCD which gives better quality photographs.

The Olympus D-535 is a low end digital camera, but it always worked well and it would have continued operating  for years more if it wasn’t physically broken. I highly recommend Olympus products and I’m currently using a digital Stylus camera. I’m planning on buying a DSLR, but I will continue using a small point and shoot camera because this they are portable and are easy to take anywhere.

Why is the significant? Your TV will become a web browser. You will be able to watch TV shows and movies on demand. While this technology is already available on current TV services, you will also have the advantage of viewing videos on the Internet, such as from YouTube.

A very interesting part of Google TV is that it will run Android apps. This opens up a new and very large market for software developers. TV watchers can download and install Android apps. There are many types of applications that can be sold for the TV and their typical low cost and ease of purchase through app stores will be a major money maker for software developers. Its time to master Android programming. Developer information for Google TV isn’t available yet, but you can submit your e-mail address to Google to be informed when it is ready.

Web developers should also go to the Google TV Web Site Optimization Guide in order to make their web sites view correctly on this service.

It was only a matter of time before the Internet came to your TV. Computer stores sell LCD TV’s along with computer monitors. There really isn’t much difference between the two, except one has a TV tuner and better speakers.

There are boxes developed for directly interfacing with a TV to add the Google services. Hopefully, there will also be software available to use a desktop computer with your TV. With a computer, you won’t need a separate DVD/Blue Ray player because everything will be in one box.

The merging of the Internet and TV is inevitable. Let’s hope that TV’s remain smart and don’t degrade to the sort of programming on Idiocracy, where a video was displayed in the centre and there were ads all around on it on the screen.

Web video playback (H.264) is now dominant with a 54% market share. This is a large increase from the 10% market share it had in January 2010. HTML5 is rapidly replacing Flash for video playback on web sites. Flash still dominates video playback on desktop computers, though.

The main problem with streaming videos on web sites is that the user needs to have the right player to view it. This could also mean the latest version of the player if earlier versions are not able to play the video. A technology being offered here is iframe embeds. The web browser will choose the best player to play the video.

Even though HTML5 is seen as a competitor to Flash, Adobe is developing Edge. This is an application for creating animation in HTML5. The following video gives a preview of Edge.

Predicting the Future in 1964

In addition to his writing ability, he had a talent for predicting the future. The video clip below shows him predicting what the future may hold 50 years later. This is from a BBC programme called Horizon made in 1964. At the time, there was no Internet and its forerunner, ARPANET, wouldn’t go online until 1969. He predicted what is becoming more and more common today: people working from home and making money online. Instead of going to a physical location to work, they would be able to work anywhere and communicate with clients/co-workers through the Internet.

Highlights of the Video

“A world in which we can be instant contact with each other, wherever we may be, we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don’t know their actual physical locations. It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Haiti or Bali just as well as he could from London. In fact, if it would prove worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even many physical skills could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world would have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of a city as a meeting place for man would have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will no longer commute, they will communicate. They won’t have to travel distance any more, they’d only travel for pleasure.”

The Dot Com Lifestyle for Everyone

We’re not quite at the point which Clarke describes and it will probably be another decade or two for it to happen. Canada and the US are increasingly becoming information and services based which is ideal for working online. The only real challenge is the acceptance of working this way and if the growth of social networking is any indication, we’re well on our way there.